


where would you rather die?

by simplyprologue



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, F/M, Future Fic, Gen, i guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-05
Updated: 2014-02-05
Packaged: 2018-01-11 06:08:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1169609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It was a complete surprise to most people, that she and Sandor Clegane were drift compatible. But Sansa thinks it makes sense; they may not know everything about each other, but their time together in the King’s Landing Shatterdome is a complicated secret in and of itself.</i> Drabble AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	where would you rather die?

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** I've had this on my tumblr for a while, but wanted to archive it here. So if you've seen it before, that's why. Drabble. Could be prodded to expand. 
> 
> Original post can be found here: http://ofhouseadama.tumblr.com/post/64728876759

It was a complete surprise to most people, that she and Sandor Clegane were drift compatible. But Sansa thinks it makes sense; they may not know everything about each other, but their time together in the King’s Landing Shatterdome is a complicated secret in and of itself. Even still, people look at the slender, poised daughter of the martyred Ned Stark and Joffrey Lannister’s old trainer, and think they don’t quite fit. 

It would upset her more if it mattered less. But they’re inside each other’s heads now, and know that they’re not fragile. They have their demons, and they fight them. She knows what goes on in his head the nights she hears him shudder awake from a nightmare, and he lets her touch him in gentle, soft, ways that she knows he’s never let anyone else do, before.

(She’s his first drift. He spent years working on bringing up and serving the Lannister piloting dynasty, running away from letting anyone else inside his head. A kind of self-preservation that she can understand, but times are desperate. And with Arya’s leg broken in four places, she’s run out of choices as well.)

(She thinks she would have chosen him anyway.)

He knows what bends her smile.

Sansa ignores the looks Arya throws her, hobbling around the control room, deciding instead to smile wanly and say, “You know how it is.”

“But  _him_? Really? Why not  _Gendry_? Or not Gendry—”

Sansa makes a noise that might be a snort, if it wasn’t tamped down on. Sansa Stark does not snort. (Sandor Clegane knows otherwise, but he likes to keep her “unladylike” qualities to himself. How a jaeger pilot could be so… delicate, he’ll never really understand, and Sansa thinks he may never stop teasing her about that and she doesn’t really mind, not when she knows what’s inside his head.) She crosses her legs in a way that might convey condescension, if Arya hadn’t spent two years crawling around the inside of her head.

“You  _know_.”

Arya sighs.

She does.

“I don’t like it.”

Sansa smiles cheerfully. “You don’t have to. I’m the one who has to be inside his head, not you.”

Arya scowls. “I’m sure it’s a lovely place to be.”

It’s no, not particularly, and Sansa remembers the first time in neural handshake with Sandor, how they both struggled not to chase the rabbit—how she first chased him down the hall of a small, rattletrap house to a warmly-lit room, a small boy playing in the dim light with his older brother’s Christmas toys, looking around nervously, and then the snap of fear Sansa had felt go down her spine, how she had begged him to come back, that it wasn’t real, that it was over, the little boy screaming as the flesh burned away from his face.

“Come back,” she’d whisper. Again, and again, stroking his hair while he shivered into the skin of her neck. “Come back.”

He’d seen her dark spots too, in person, and then from the inside. She’d seen his time with Arya, on the run, was inside his head while Joffrey beat her. Forgiveness is a funny thing, but Sansa thinks the good outweighs the bad, and at the end of the world, she’d rather let go of the hurt where she may. 

“Come back.”

He strokes her hair too, sometimes, just because although she smiles more it doesn’t mean she needs it any less.

And then calls her “little bird,” because he was there, even before she found him in the drift. 


End file.
